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Merete Lie
Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture
NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
N-7491 Trondheim, Norway
merete.lie@hf.ntnu.no
Lara Croft and her sisters
The paper analyses the design of some famous women who appear as protagonists in
computer games and in other features on the Internet. Meeting a persona like Lara Croft or
one of her internet sisters, one may question whether they are representations of women. Are
they rather masculine heroes disguised in female bodies? They are confusing because their
bodies are highly sexualised but still their gender is rather ambiguous. But my question is
whether these figures that may appear confusing, rather are characteristic of how gender is
apprehended in our times?
Lara Croft is a visible front figure of the computer game Tomb Raider (Figure 1). She is
definitely a ‘she’, the way we see her, a female figure of great sex appeal. Tomb Raider was a
great success when it was launched in 1996, and Lara became a most popular figure. She has
her own life even outside of the game, with web pages, fan clubs, etc. Lara has also become a
film star – though in the latter case her role was performed by a woman of flesh and blood. In
the game, Lara is always present on the screen, constantly on the move and physically active.
Lara’s home is a place for exercise, for keeping her body fit and strong. Freedom and
independence are what she values most, and travelling is her way to achieve that. Lara is a
fighter and a shooting star, confronted with endless fighting and physical trials. In that sense,
she reflects other cultural icons displayed in films of the last decade, starting with Thelma and
Louise, shooting their way within a storyline of the traditional, masculine road movie (Liestøl
2001). And though Lara is the most famous of the tough computer game heroines, she is not
alone.
My perspective here is to consider information technology as a key technology and therefore
a key symbol of our times. But symbols are not only descriptive or reflective of culture. They
are also vehicles of meaning, or that which stimulates thinking (Geertz 1973). New
technologies can therefore present new models for how things are, and my question is whether
contemporary technology provides a new model for how to think about gender.

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How we think with things may be illustrated by the two artefacts of a drill and a mix-master
(Figure 2). This pair can in fact illustrate a concentrated representation of gender in our time.
A newspaper journalist presented the two artefacts under the headline: “When he met her”.
This has to do with the artefacts’ different forms, colours, and functions, as well as
associations to the contexts they are used in and the people who use them. There is roughness
versus purity, hard metal versus the vulnerable plastic, and the aggressiveness represented by
the pistol shape of the drill versus the rather peaceful, downwards bent mixer – in other
words, a whole range of representations of gender as difference. They display all these
differences despite the fact that they use the same type of technology, a small machine that
causes something to rotate. The packaging of this machinery is, however, very different for
the two artefacts.
The illustration of the mixer and the drill is taken from an exhibition with the title ‘The
Gender of Things’ (Oudshoorn et al 2002). The aim of arranging this exhibition was to
destabilise the common understandings of gender as well as technology. The artefacts
demonstrate that technology is more than useful tools. Technologies are also things with
cultural meaning. Also gender is more than sexual bodies and two types of human beings.
Gender is a cultural category that we implicitly use to sorting things out.
Another example of how technologies may present new models of reasoning is that when
machines produced goods, they supported the idea of a material basis for society.
Contemporary technologies, however, reflect the idea that society is built on information and
information flows. Information technology is complex, changeable, and multi-functional. As a
reflection of our time, it shows that one can have many identities, based on a variety of ‘inner
qualities’. People are complex and fragmented in the same way, and in communication online,
can choose between different identities (cf. Turkle 1995). In interaction with computers, we
learn to relate to the surface: you are the one you present yourself to be.
The human body was previously configured as a machine, whereas it is now increasingly
depicted as a cyborg creation. The machine metaphor provided an image of a stable body
where each part did its ‘job’, such as the heart working as a pump within a human transport
system (Bolter 1984). The cyborg body is, however, a malleable construction of which parts
can be reconstructed, exchanged or improved, by such means as cosmetic surgery or organic

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transplantation (Balsamo 1996). Thus we have moved towards a perception of the body as
‘cultural plastic’ (Bordo 1991).
Thus, the understanding of gender and gender difference is not as stable as it used to be.
Traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity are today often referred to as myths,
e g all men are not rational, all women are not sensitive etc. These are rather symbolic
connections. In popular language, myths of gender mean stories that we should look through;
they do in other words not represent the truth about gender. Referring to the concept of myth
we should, however, rather consider them as condensed versions of what a culture defines as
masculine and feminine, and this is absolutely real, in the sense that symbols and myths are an
important part of reality, though this is different from what men and women are and do.
Here studying gender symbolism in new information technology, I’ll refer to gender as a
mythological system, the way such systems are defined by Roland Barthes (1972): as a self-
referential chain of meaning. These chains of meaning are so obvious and so tightly
interwoven that they become invisible as constructions of meaning and appear as natural
connections. This is exactly the principle of myth: for instance, advertising does not hide or
deny women’s location in society. On the contrary, advertisements exhibit this location as
natural and given. “And this is the common and subtle principle of all myths: they hide
nothing, their function is to distort, not to make things disappear“ (Barth 1972). In that sense
we may consider Lara Croft and her sisters as exaggerations of the feminine body, making it
more visible what it is all about.
Initially, I referred to them as amazons, thus to an ancient mythical figure. It is a paradox that
so many of the stories on the internet are based on ancient legends – in other words, that new
technology is used to recreate ancient times. The storyline of such games generally involves a
fight against evil forces, but a difference to old stories about brave knights and ladies to be
rescued, some of the most popular conquerors are female personae, or it is a persona that the
player constructs by building it up step by step, choosing its qualities, including its gender. I
shall start with the amazons, and come back to the latter (gender as a matter of choice).
Figure 9 shows a female body with an exaggerated feminine shape. This female figure has
attributes and skills that can be interpreted as traditionally masculine. She appears to be a sort

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of ‘action man’ in a body of excessive feminine forms. The most famous of these ladies is
Lara Croft: over-dimensioned, unconquerable – but the question is, of which gender?
According to the creator of Tomb Raider, Toby Gard: “Lara was designed to be a tough, self-
reliant, intelligent woman. She confounds all the sexist clichés apart from the fact that she’s
got an unbelievable figure. Strong, independent women are the perfect fantasy girls – the
untouchable is always the most desirable” (Cassell and Jenkins 1998:30). Thus, Lara was
created to be attractive to men as the main target group, but at the same time also to women.
In that sense she is a perfect cross-dresser, and cross-dressing is a most popular activity on the
Internet. The anonymity offered on the Net has spurred the curiosity of experiencing, for a
man how it is to act as a woman and vice versa. In the game, a male player actually is Lara
and performs as a woman, and simultaneously he controls her. For women players, she offers
the possibility to act like men and to possess desirable ‘masculine’ connotated qualities like
courage and strength – while performing in the guise of a firm and fit female body.
Lara Croft has a Norwegian sister called April Ryan (Figure 10), who is the main character in
the computer game The Longest Journey. The male producers of this game describe her thus:
“April is 18 years old, independent, intelligent and beautiful … She doesn’t have as big tits as
figures in other games … She is attractive, but no sex bomb”. In this adventure game,
intelligence is of more importance than force, and in symbolic terms, the amount of
intelligence is so to say inversely linked to the size of breasts. Being a sex symbol links to
another chain of meaning than intelligence does; the former does, however, link to femininity.
The designers go on to say, like Lara’s creator, that they believe female front figures appeal to
both sexes. From this one can conclude that the gender of the figure that the player identifies
with may vary; having the right attributes is what matters. Qualities such as beauty,
intelligence, and bravery can be placed in both male and female bodies, as long as the body is
strong, unconquerable and has an appealing shape.
We may say that these game personae are female according to the sign of their bodies, in the
sense that the body is not considered as nature but that bodily features are not only nature but
also basic symbols of gender. Thus, we recognise them as female personae on the ‘outside’,
whereas their qualities and practices would rather be conceptualised as classically masculine.
If they represent a new femininity, what type of masculinity could these female game

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personae make a contrast to? Since they have qualities conventionally recognised as
masculine, should then a counterpart be a ‘feminised’ masculinity, or rather one that is ‘more
masculine’ in the sense of even tougher than her? In the same vein, it is hard to tell if April is
more or less feminine than Lara. She may be considered less so because the female attributes
of tits, thighs and buttocks that make Lara ‘more feminine’ than any woman are less well
developed in her case. April may, however, appear as more feminine because even if she is
tough and brave, she is depicted as both sensitive and vain. Lara embodies overall qualities
like drive, aggressiveness and force, which are attributes with masculine connotations.
The exaggerated feminine attributes have made some draw the conclusion that this particular
version of ‘femininity’ is not based on a model of women but on male fantasies of them.
We find, however, a mix of traditional qualities and new ones. The body shapes are
traditional, but linked to a new hardness of body and mind. Is this a male fantasy? It can also
be said to be a contemporary ideal among young women. A psychiatrist working with eating
disorders, states that the new ideal among women is to have not only a firm, but a hard body
(Skårderud 1999). This implies, in extreme cases, getting rid of the soft parts and getting
down to the bones. The question is whether eating disorders are apprehended as deviance or
as an expression of femininity in contemporary culture. In the terms of a Norwegian social
anthropologist (Solheim 1998), eating disorders are a ‘sexually transmitted disease’ of
contemporary culture, that is, a soft body is associated with weakness whereas hard exercise
and little food produces a desirable hard body. If so, these game personae do not represent
masculinity hidden within a female body. The hardness may instead represent a new ideal of
the female body.
Another relevant icon of the female body is the Barbie doll - often despised but definitely
ambiguous - not unlike the Spice Girls and their ‘girl power’. Barbie’s body is feminine but
not soft. “Hers is a body of hard edges, distinct borders, self control. It is literally
impenetrable” (Urla and Swedlund 2000). Barbie is another female hard body, associating
control and mastery with the contemporary female body and is in this sense similar to the
computer game heroines. Still, Barbie is definitely not a cross-dresser.
The combination of feminine and masculine in Lara’s case could be referred to a mismatch
between her “exterior” qualities, i.e. the feminine signs of the body, and her “interior”
qualities, i.e. interests, values and feelings with masculine connotations. Lara looks feminine
on the outside, but likes to kill. We may, however, ask if this is an outdated question. It

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touches on the idea of a stable identity which should be in accordance with how one looks, to
be given credibility as an authentic person. However, according to the American psycologist
Sherry Turkle (1995), we have in our encounter with computers, learned to take things at face
value. Things ‘are’ what they are on the surface. Or do we still expect that particular ‘interior’
qualities should match a body that is recognised as either feminine or masculine? To discuss
this point, I shall take my last example, which is the computer game The SIMS (Figure 11).
The SIMS is a very popular game, despite the fact that it is not a traditional shooting or
discovery game, but is about the trivialities of everyday life. Playing it involves tasks such as
furnishing the home, cooking and going to work. The social relationships between the game
personae are also important. In contrast to Lara Croft and her ‘sisters’, these personae look
like ordinary people. Externally they are men and women, but the player decides on their
‘content’. As a player, you start with outer attributes such as hair, clothes, and skin color, and
then go on to choose personality characteristics based on five variables: neat, active,
outgoing, playful,l and nice. The player uses a scale from 1-10 to decide how much of each of
these qualities a game persona will have, and these choices have consequences for how they
manage in the game. The point is that these choices are completely independent of the gender
of the chosen figure. You do not choose a pre-produced entity with given qualities. Thus,
personal qualities are not connected to gender. Externally, the figures have traditional gender
attributes, but these women and men can be ‘filled up’ with inner qualities independent of
their external gender attributes.
In this talk, I have been looking for ideas that are embedded in and presented by new
technologies. In the end, my question is which model today’s technology promotes as a model
for contemporary understandings of gender. The above examples show that, in the world of
computer games, the ‘external’ gender signs of the body are separated from the ‘internal’
attributes of the game personae. Moreover, it is assumed that both women and men will
identify with the strong winning types, independent of their ‘external’ gender, that is, if the
protagonist is identified as a man or a woman. Based on these examples, I would suggest that
contemporary technology supports the following model for gender today: And that is, gender
as an ‘empty shell’ which can be filled with desirable attributes and qualities based on
personal preference.

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